A day late for my Cool Tool Alert of the week, but hey, yesterday was a holiday here in the States!

This cool tool alert will be very helpful for promoting webinars, concerts, networking events, etc. Calendar Tweet allows you to tweet out short links to events you create, promote them via Twitter, and gather lists of attendees.

Created by Fredrickus Williford and launched about a week ago, this new Twitter service tool has potential! Some of the things you can do with it include:

Tagging, sharing, and promoting events

Use as a private Calendar or promotional event management tool for Twitter

Monitoring to see if your friends or followers will be attending an event

Calendar Tweet uses the Twitter oAuth System so you can login through twitter automatically without having to provide credentials.

A cool discovery is that when you create an event, the description area accepts HTML code, so you can post links and things in your description area. So, if you simply want to use Calendar Tweet as a quick service to re-direct people to an Eventbrite.com, Evite.com, or Meetup.com site, you can do so.

You can also either publicly tweet out events or keep them private and then invite just a select group of people. Couple this with TweetParty and you’ve got a completely Twitter-ized event management process. For example:

Say I want to have a quick local geek get-together for lunch tomorrow. I don’t want to take the time to create a big production for invitations but I want to make sure I invite my tweeps. I set up a quick Calendar Tweet for lunch:

Notice I un-checked “Tweet Event” as I want it to be private – otherwise your event will automatically be sent out as a tweet through your Twitter account. When marked private, the link and event are still created, it is just not tweeted out through my account. It ends up looking like this on the Calendar Tweet page:

Once the event is created, you’ll want to go back into your event and edit it to make it publicly accessible, otherwise the link will not work when you send it to people (since it’s private):

Since I only want to send this to a few people, I can then access my TweetParty account and select which group I would like to invite. I have a group for lunchtime tweeters (it’s purposely small):

I then follow the directions for sending a group a private message, and copy/paste in the link to my Calendar Tweet event:

And as people decide to join me for this get-together, I will be able to see them on my calendar event page.

You can also add events directly from Twitter. Just send a direct message on Twitter to @cal_tweet (you must be following first). For example:.

As an added bonus, Calendar Tweet will send out a reminder prior to the event to remind attendees and to help increase turnout.

A couple of things I noticed about Calendar Chat that I’d like to see fixed:

The date/time selection seems to be a little glitchy; it doesn’t like activities scheduled for noon (changes them to 12am for the following day). You have to rig the actual date for a day early in order to get the correct date; at least this was the case at the time of this post being written.

I would like an option to not tweet a public event automatically, or a link that can be sent to and actually viewed by select people for a private event.

It would be great to have a place for people to leave comments when they decide to accept a calendar event invitation.

I’d like to see the ability to quickly add a Calendar Tweet event to an Outlook / iCal / Google Calendar. Could we get some links on the site to do so?